should thereafter differ not only in degree but even in kind from all that had gone before.  Immediately after the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama there began a tremendous religious ferment; the awakening of intellect went hand in hand with the moral uprising; the great names of Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo show that the mind of man was breaking the fetters that had cramped it; and for the first time experimentation was used as a check upon observation and theorization.  Since then, century by century, the changes have increased in rapidity and complexity, and have attained their maximum in both respects during the century just past.  Instead of being directed by one or two dominant peoples, as was the case with all similar movements of the past, the new movement was shared by many different nations.  From every standpoint it has been of infinitely greater moment than anything hitherto seen.  Not in one but in many different peoples there has been extraordinary growth in wealth, in population, in power of organization, and in mastery over mechanical activity and natural resources.  All of this has been accompanied and signalized by an immense outburst of energy and restless initiative.  The result is as varied as it is striking.

In the first place, representatives of this civilization, by their conquest of space, were enabled to spread into all the practically vacant continents, while at the same time, by their triumphs in organization and mechanical invention, they acquired an unheard-of military superiority as compared with their former rivals.  To these two facts is primarily due the further fact that for the first time there is really something that approaches a world civilization, a world movement.  The spread of the European peoples since the days of Ferdinand the Catholic and Ivan the Terrible has been across every sea and over every continent.  In places the conquests have been ethnic; that is, there has been a new wandering of the peoples, and new commonwealths have sprung up in which the people are entirely or mainly of European blood.  This is what happened in the temperate and sub-tropical regions of the Western Hemisphere, in Australia, in portions of northern Asia and southern Africa.  In other places the conquest has been purely political, the Europeans representing for the most part merely a small caste of soldiers and administrators, as in most of tropical Asia and Africa and in much of tropical America.  Finally, here and there instances occur where there has been no conquest at all, but where an alien people is profoundly and radically changed by the mere impact of Western civilization.  The most extraordinary instance of this, of course, is Japan; for Japan’s growth and change during the last half-century has been in many ways the most striking phenomenon of all history.  Intensely proud of her past history, intensely loyal to certain of her past traditions, she has yet with a single effort wrenched herself free from all hampering ancient ties, and with a bound has taken her place among the leading civilized nations of mankind.